[MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Krimel <Krimel at krimel.com> wrote:
> [DM]
> Yes concepts and thinking are based on analogies, but analogies of what?

Dan:
Of what we know. What else could they be?

> Where do analogies start, how do they get going?

Dan:
If you are using the term analogies as synonymous with static quality,
then it seems clear they emerge from experience.

> Do we not discover
> regularities in experience before concepts?

Dan:
No. There is only a 'dim apprehension of we know not what.'

> Regularities like hot? Is not
> hotness a form of quality, a static quality we understand long before -as a
> species- we get to language and concepts.

Dan:
There are different forms of understanding in the MOQ. Take a taste of
chocolate and then try and describe the taste. We understand
biological patterns like taste and smell but not in terms we can
intellectualize. Is that what you mean?

> And long before we get to
> analogies about really 'hot' looking girls? You know whatever happened to
> those hot stove static qualities of value?

Dan:
Well, again, as perceivers of Quality we wake to the breaking moment.
Everything else is an analogy. We build up a repertoire of cultural
knowledge as we grow older. Soon we come to believe that knowledge is
the world. But it is only what we think the world is. We see what we
know is true and ignore the rest.

>
> [Krimel]
> Well yeah, that is an issue and one I have been trying to make so sense of.
> We are creatures geared toward finding difference. We are possessed of an
> array of sensory neurons for doing just that. But we also have memory which
> lifts us out of the differences of each passing moment and allows
> comparisons of the past with the present.

Dan:
If we look at the 'present' as (direct) experience then it becomes
clear that static quality in the MOQ is a memory of experience. It
always lags behind the present. In the moment there are no
distinctions. I think that is what the Buddha was on about when he
spoke of there being no east and west in the sky, how our thinking
makes it so.

> This yields generalization and
> analogy where some properties of the present are regarded as similar along
> some dimension to some previous experience. In language what you get is a
> semantic network of interconnected pairing of signifiers and experience.

Dan:
As long as it is remembered that experience as you use the term here
is after the breaking moment. That's where a great deal of confusion
arises: using the differing meanings of experience as pointing to the
same.

> I think you are on target with the problem of SQ. I don't think it can be
> address without appreciating the distinction between rational and irrational
> or what Pirsig call pre-intellectual thought.

Dan:
I don't think this is right. Distinctions arise after the
pre-intellectual moment. How could they not? By allowing concepts to
infiltrate the pre-intellectual we destroy any semblance of the MOQ.
I've done a quick search of Lila and I find no mention of
'pre-intellectual thought.' There is a reason for that. If it is
pre-intellectual, how can there be thought?

> I would say it is in the
> process of naming which is rational and digital and artificial. Almost
> everything we do as beings is done without any of that. We respond to
> patterns in the lifeworld and develop habits of action completely without
> rational analysis or even conscious awareness. I would argue that there are
> cognitive activities going on in these processes but they are irrational in
> that they do not require any stepwise, reasoned, algorithmic accounts. They
> are analog.

Dan:
Perhaps. But they take place after the present moment. Anything, be it
rational, irrational, digital, analog, are all static quality patterns
emerging from experience. At least if we are talking the MOQ, which I
assume we are.

Thank you for your insights.

Dan

http://www.danglover.com